


I'm On Watch Here (So Close Your Eyes And Get Some Rest)

by lisachan



Series: Leoverse [287]
Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, M/M
Language: Italiano
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:07:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24088612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lisachan/pseuds/lisachan
Summary: Like every night, all night, Cody sits by the edge of Leo’s bed. And watches him sleep.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Series: Leoverse [287]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/30541





	I'm On Watch Here (So Close Your Eyes And Get Some Rest)

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING:** This story is an **AU** from the original 'verse. What happens in here has little to none correlation with what happens in Leonard Karofsky-Hummel VS The world or Broken Heart Syndrome. The characters involved are (mostly) the same, but situations and relationships between them may be completely different.  
> Here presenting the ghost!AU no one needed and no one asked for, but that I definitely wanted to write. In this one, Leo and Blaine never got together in the first place, also because Blaine is a dark, dangerous creature called the King of Darkness. Cody and Leo got together in college, but Cody couldn't fight his depression and eventually suicided. Only to find out ghosts are very real, and he is now one of them. The rest you'll find out by yourself.  
> Not sure if I'll ever write about this 'verse again, but this little tiny bit of it now exists. You're welcome!  
> This is the second time Cody appears in the multiverse as a ghost. What could it mean?  
> This story also participates to [Chapter 0.II](https://www.landedifandom.net/explorers-chapter-0-parte-2/) of the [Explorers](https://www.landedifandom.net/sezione/explorers/) challenge @ [landedifandom.net](https://www.landedifandom.net/). You don't know what that is and you want a writing challenge that also gets you roleplaying with a real master and teams of weird people playing weird characters online? You better check it out, then!

Like every night, all night, Cody sits by the edge of Leo’s bed.

He watches him sleep, for the most part. He could never grow bored of it. He used to do it when he was alive too – Leo used to just fall asleep after talking him and himself stupid for hours, telling him stories ripped off from comics and tv shows, or his own creations, and then he’d just collapse, snoring lightly, and he would sleep the sleep of stones, heavy and deep, and his dreams would be quiet, and Cody would just look at him for hours on end, studying his features, marking them in hot wax in his memory. He looked at him so long and hard he could still remember every single expression Leo used to do while asleep even hours after, during the next day. He’d sit down in the college garden, somewhere private and safe, and he would fill his sketchbook with sketches of him, with the carbon copy of his nighttime memories.

If only he’d known, back then, how precious that was. How worthy it would’ve been of him to just hold on a little bit longer, just try to keep going until the pain would fade enough for him to actually believe he might have had a chance to put it past himself.

He didn’t know back then, though. You never know, when you’re alive and in pain. Now Cody sees shadows all the time, he wasn’t even aware of the fact that there are so many, surrounding the living. Every house in the world, he suspects, housed a dying person, at some point. Every person got so close to someone else to unconsciously hold on to a bit of a dead loved one’s soul, just enough to keep them with themselves, even long after they were gone. And the buildings, the streets, the woods, the cities, the oceans, the whole world, they’re crowded with shadows, shadows you don’t see when you’re alive, shadows you only see when you become a shadow yourself.

Now Cody sees them. He speaks with them, and they all tell the same story. The same story he himself tells when he speaks with them. I didn’t know, when I was alive. I didn’t suspect. That living was so precious. That love was well worth going through whatever kind of pain, sailing through whatever kind of stormy sea, just to feel loved for one more minute again.

It didn’t feel so when he was alive. When he was alive, pain was everything, at times it was devastating. It turned everything sour, everything bitter. Even love and how good it was just felt pointless if he just thought that, once that single moment of pleasure had passed, pain would’ve been back, and a thousand times stronger, drowning everything else down.

There’s a shadow living inside Leo’s nightlamp – it happens, over time, shadows can grow dimmer, they can lose their original shapes, they can get smaller and just take root into an object very near one of them, just to ground themselves; Cody’s trying to just take root very close to Leo, hoping he can reside in him, someday – it used to be a woman, once. She claims she’s always been in the lamp. She was there when Cody woke up next to Leo, for sure. She asked him about how he died, once, and Cody told her everything while he watched Leo sleep. He told her about William, about what he felt for him, about the years of abuse. He told her how William twisted the meaning of the word love in an irreversible way, for him. He told her about attempting to kill himself once and being saved. He told her about meeting Leo and living in a bubble of hope for a while, until things got worse again. He told them of the meds, then, and about overdosing. How it felt like filling up and filling up and then just turn off, painlessly.

“Ah, depression,” she said, flickering a little inside the lamp, “Depression’s a bitch.”

Cody wouldn’t have been able to say it better himself. He always identified his depression with a rabid dog, anyway. Constantly hungry, sick in an uncurable way, ready to infect any other part of his life with just one sloppy bite.

Being alive with Leo felt good. And it should’ve been enough. But it wasn’t. And, believing that would’ve been forever, Cody chose to end it quickly, quietly, early on. Before it turned too heavy for anyone involved.

So he fell asleep, believing he wouldn’t wake up again. And then he woke up, and he was a shadow, and Leo was wailing like sometimes the wind does when it seems to carry with himself the wail of a thousand dead. And Cody realized he had acted too late – that depression, the bitch, had already jumped off and moved from his body to Leo’s, and was now invading him.

He watched Leo do nothing but sleep for days after his death. He didn’t go to his funeral, didn’t even call his parents. He stopped seeing his friends and moved back into his fathers’ home. They had taken him back in, they welcomed him and gave him back his old room. They fed him and covered him, when he stopped washing himself they did it in his stead, they drove him to the doctor first and to the therapist next, they took note of the medicines he was supposed to take and made sure he took them, and when things didn’t start to get better they just looked at each other and realized that was their new reality, now, that there was nothing else they could do except wait and see what would’ve been of their once bright boy.

All the while, Cody just watched. Glued to Leo’s side, he would cry, sometimes, hoping Leo would hear him, hoping that sharing tears would somehow make Leo feel better. (It didn’t.)

He grew frustrated, too. Leo’s parents were doing all they possibly could to protect him. And he wanted to do the same – he just didn’t know how.

Little did he know that his chance would’ve come sooner than he expected to.

All the shadows call _him_ the Boogeyman, but _he_ doesn’t call himself that way. The first night _he_ came, he presented himself as a black, slithering snake, his scales so dark they could barely be distinguished at all from his eyes. He climbed up Leo’s bed and rolled up at the feet of it, looking up at Cody, hissing. “And who are you?” he asked with a deep, heavily vibrating voice that kept just an echo of the hissing one would expect from a snake.

“I’m Cody,” he answered, getting unconsciously closer to Leo’s sleeping figure, “Who are you?”

The snake hissed, his thin, forked tongue flickering out of his mouth. “I’m the king of darkness,” he just said, “I come for him, as I came for you.”

Cody opened his eyes wide and just watched the snake change shape into a tall white man, with long dark curls framing his face. A strong jaw, thin lips, the vague shadow of a beard, thick eyebrows, small dark eyes, a darkness about him speaking of long-lost things, forgotten things, painful things. Looking at him, Cody immediately remembered him. He had a different shape when he came for him – he looked like William. Smiling wickedly, he appeared before him right after Cody swallowed his pills, and he started tugging at him, pushing him into deep slumber.

Cody recognized that man. It was his monster. He had just changed appearance to become Leo’s monster.

So he squared his shoulders, staring defiantly at him. “You won’t get close to him,” he said, “I’ll protect him.”

The man stared at him, no anger in his eyes, no bother, perhaps a hint of curiosity. “You can’t protect those who want harm to come their way,” he said, “You’re proof of that.”

Cody clutched his fists down his sides, standing his ground. “I’ll prove you wrong,” he said. The man clicked his tongue and faded away.

He came back the next night, and he keeps coming back every night. During the day, Cody watches Leo undo himself, cry more, eat less, speak less, sleep more, until his parents realize he hasn’t spoken a word for days and come force him to a little chat. During the night, he protects him. He just sits by his side and waits for the king of darkness to come, only to push him away. Earn Leo one more night, and one more day, to live. No matter how painful – because now that he’s a shadow, he knows. Pain will pass, and Leo will be better again, and when that happens Cody will take pleasure in knowing he protected him long enough to allow him to see that time coming, and surviving it all.

The king of darkness keeps visiting, of course. There’s no convincing him otherwise, he’s relentless. Sometimes he just stands by the door, or by the window, or by the closet, the dark outline of his body snuffing out the moonlight, making the night just a little bit darker, and he says nothing, he just stares at them with empty eyes, a low growl vibrating in the back of his throat, teeth like fangs flashing out in the shadows of the night. (Cody holds on and tries to keep himself from shaking in fear. He knows he’s eternal, now, that nothing can touch him, and yet he fears the king of darkness, as though he unconsciously felt, deep inside his bones, that if there’s a creature that can still hurt him, that’s him.)

Some other times he comes closer. He sits down next to Cody on the edge of the bed, he asks him questions, listens closely to him, lets him speak. He looks just like any other human being, then, and his face inspires trust and makes Cody wants to open up for him.

Some nights he touches him. He reaches out and strokes Cody’s cheek, speaking softly to him. Haven’t you suffered enough already, pet?, he says. Why do you keep fighting this useless war, why do you procrastinate the inevitable?

But that’s just the thing, Cody says, he doesn’t believe it’s inevitable. He sees the darkness inside of Leo, he recognizes that sadness. But he wants to believe it can be beaten. That even though he couldn’t, perhaps Leo could.

His only job is to keep the king of darkness at bay. To give Leo more time. More time to figure this out. 

“You can’t save him,” the king of darkness says, smiling sadly at him, leaning in to kiss him on his mouth with lips as cold as a tombstone. And Cody thinks that’s okay. He doesn’t want to. He knows that’s not his role. He’s not a savior. He’s merely a guardian.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cody answers as he watches the man step away. He feels his own lips curl into a smile, and he allows it. He takes pleasure in it. “He’ll save himself.”

The king of darkness smirks, then shakes his head. “Death didn’t kill you, pet,” the man says, “But your love will crush you. It’ll consume you. You’ll become the smallest shadow. A particle of pain clinging to the body of a boy who forgot you.”

Once again, Cody finds himself thinking it doesn’t matter much. He imagines himself turning into a particle, the smallest memory, fine dust. Clinging to Leo’s skin forever, staying with him without weighing him down.

That doesn’t sound half bad.

He watches the king of darkness disappear, and that’s when the air gets warmer around him, and he turns towards the window, and he can see the sun coming up from behind the tall buildings forming Lima’s skyline. He squints just a little and raises a hand to protect his eyes. As always in the sunlight, he turns transparent, even more than he already is. It’s a bit worrying, and he hasn’t gotten used to it yet, but the warmth feels good, and there’s something else that feels good, and that’s Leo whimpering softly as he slowly wakes up.

He turns to look at him and smiles, watching him yawn and stretch out like a lazy cat. His eyelids flicker, and he opens his eyes into two thin slits. Cody can enjoy a taste of his dark blues, and he smiles as Leo squints in the dim light of morning, focusing on him.

Sometimes it happens. It’s a blessing, when it does.

“Cody…?” Leo whispers softly, his voice still heavy of sleep, as he tries to get his curls out of his face, to see better, “Is that you, sweetness…?”

“It’s me,” Cody smiles and reaches out, trying to touch Leo’s cheek. He doesn’t manage, of course, but Leo doesn’t seem to mind.

“It’s you, aren’t you?” he goes on, as though he hadn’t heard him, “You’ve come to visit me.”

“I have,” Cody nods, withdrawing his hand. Leo might not mind, but he breaks up inside every time he realizes he can’t touch him anymore. “I’d ask you a billion things, if you could hear my voice,” he keeps whispering, while Leo yawns again and already starts losing him, forgetting he could be able to see him if he just focused hard enough. “Do you miss me? Do you regret ever meeting me? Do you know I sit by your side night after night, keeping watch? Do you know I’d dedicate my eternal life to this, just to see you happy again?” He takes a deep breath and then, with a shaky voice, he utters, “Do you still love me, Leo? Will you still love me tomorrow?”

Leo yawns a third time, and turns on his side, getting more comfortable on the bed. “Just come in my dreams next time,” he mutters as he falls back to sleep, “I’d love to talk with you again.”

Cody watches him for as long as it takes for Leo to sleep again.

Like every day, all day, he’ll just sit by his side.

He could never grow bored of it.


End file.
